


Returning to Hogsmeade

by zephrene



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Legilimency, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-22
Updated: 2010-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 02:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/81999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zephrene/pseuds/zephrene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em> Once, in Oslo, when Luna was preparing for her Mastery in Charms, a fellow student had commented, laughing, that she was as likely to fail her exams as she was to kill another person</em>. Luna returns to Hogsmeade seeking an ending and a beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Returning to Hogsmeade

**Author's Note:**

> maudlin, angst-ridden fluff; graphic violence; a distinct lack of hot buttered smut.

Luna stepped out of the Floo and brushed ash from her cloak, habit making her glance around the small arrivals parlor at the back of the Three Broomsticks to assess any threats. She no longer remembered a time when she had traveled free of such caution, her wand ready to draw. The room was empty. She made her way quickly through the short hallway to the main entrance, where the usual noises of a happy clientele spilled over into the foyer. Luna stepped up to the door, took a deep breath, and grasped the handle. Snow fell so thick that she could barely see the street, and the wind blew flurries inside and onto the floor as she opened the heavy wood a few inches.

Her foot would not move. She stood still for endless seconds on the threshold, then the door slipped from her grasp and she stumbled back a few paces.

She could not do this.

Once, in Oslo, when Luna was preparing for her Mastery in Charms, a fellow student had commented, laughing, that she was as likely to fail her exams as she was to kill another person. Luna had gone light-headed for a moment, and her hand clenched so hard on the tabletop that her fingernails left gouges in the wood. She had smelled blood and smoke and heard voices screaming - her own voice, screaming- but at a remove from her self. She had known that she was not in Hogsmeade, but actually in the Akershus Library, and she had been able to feel the table under her fingers. She had given herself a splinter.

Master Karl had scolded her companion for reminding her of her traumatic past. They tended to forget, because there had been so little Death Eater activity in Norway, and because she was so little what they expected from a veteran, that Luna had been a part of that war.

They had asked, the first day, about the long thin scars that zig-zagged down her cheekbone, jaw, and neck to disappear where her shirts covered her collarbone on her left side. She had told them it was an encounter with an animal when she was in the field. After that they ceased to wonder, since many of them had similar stories, and even a few scars. That Luna never participated in their boasting over drinks they chalked up to British reserve or her own shyness.

She saw no reason to tell them that the animal in question had been an insane Death Eater wearing poisoned metal barbs on his gloves, who had surprised her while she ran errands in Hogsmeade. She saw no reason to tell them that she had gouged her own marks down Rabastan LeStrange's face with only her fingernails, or that when he bound her hands she had kicked until he pinned her feet to the ground so he could more easily shred her robe and the flesh beneath with his tainted claws. She saw no reason to tell them that she had seized the moment as he untangled her robe from his fingers to fumble a piece of her broken potion bottles into her bound hands and drive it with all her strength into side of his neck. She certainly saw no reason to tell them that she spent long minutes lying in that alley in Hogsmeade with Rabastan's dead weight crushing her, as their blood ran together through the gaps in the cobblestones and her voice grew weaker and weaker.

But all that was in the past. She had moved on, first to Germany, then Russia and China, and finally Scandinavia. She had gotten over it all.

Yet here she stood, a newly minted Charms Mistress, direct from the London flat where last night Ginny had thrown her a grand party to celebrate her achievement and her homecoming. Here she stood, so eager to seek out a certain much-missed Potions Master that she had not even bothered returning to her hotel before Flooing here. If only she could set foot outside the Three Broomsticks and actually walk to his door.

Luna pulled her cloak and hood close around her to fight the cold that came blowing in with every patron. She took another deep breath, counting slowly in her head. It was only Hogsmeade, and there was nothing now to fear but the sort of riff-raff any village boasts. She lifted her hand toward the door latch then dropped it again, stepping back. Unfortunately, someone else was trying to leave, and she stepped directly onto their foot, her back bumping into another warm body.

"Watch where you're going," the man snarled, and Luna could have wept with relief. She would know that particular snarl anywhere. He kept scolding, clearly unaware of her identity or the joy with which she listened to his voice. "This is a high-traffic area, not a waiting room. I never thought anyone could beat my students for carelessness -" And then he stepped around her and saw her face.

She smiled, partly from her own pleasure in seeing him again and partly because he was simply so comical when shocked. It was obvious he had not expected to see her here. "Master Snape," she said, and could not help the breathy laughter in her voice. "I am sorry, sir."

"Miss Lovegood? No, it's Mistress Lovegood now, I got the invitation," he said, taking her elbow and guiding her out of the way of the pub's traffic.

"It's Luna," she said. "Still."

He regarded her with skepticism, saying nothing.

She insisted. "Please call me Luna. You promised you would."

"You cannot hold a man to promises made under the influence of so many healing potions," he said gravely, but his eyes were smiling.

Luna had been waiting more than six years to hold him to that promise. "I can," she said, pressing down the laughter that bubbled up. "Haven't I met your conditions? Or by 'grown' did you mean to place a height requirement?" Her adoption of heeled and platform shoes to give herself a few extra inches had been a source of vast amusement to him for the last few years.

The barest hint of a smile curled the corners of his mouth. "I would not be so cruel. But formality has its place."

"Not between friends," Luna said firmly.

"Mm. Then I suppose, if I must. Since we are friends, you may call me Severus."

She had been calling him Severus in her head for years, so this was no difficulty. But she found a certain quality in his acquiescence, even in that smile, that made her nervous. Perhaps, after all, she should have kept to the formalities. Calling her 'Mistress Lovegood' for a few hours would surely have aided his perception of her as an adult, his equal, instead of a wayward student. Wouldn't it?

"Were you on your way out, or in, Luna?" Severus asked, glancing out the window at the steady fall of snow.

She turned her face away as her fear returned, and murmured, "Out. To visit you, actually."

His hand tightened on her elbow and she wondered how much he knew, or guessed. "I haven't seen you in Hogsmeade in years," he said, and she recognized the question behind the words.

She sighed, and turned her face up to his. "This is the first time I've been back."

"In four years?" He sounded surprised.

She nodded and said, "It was easy enough to meet people in London." Many of her friends lived or worked there, and were happy to take time off when she was in town. Severus himself did business in London regularly since his retirement from Hogwarts. In almost four years of meeting there they had yet to have dinner at the same restaurant twice.

"Did your Healer approve this?" he asked shrewdly.

"She has been recommending it for months."

That seemed to decide something for Severus, and he turned them back toward the door. "Let's be quick, then, shall we?"

She shifted so that she held his arm instead of the other way around, and tried not to hold it in too tight a grip. It was only Hogsmeade, after all, and she was with Severus.

The wind cut through her cloak and all her layers the minute they set foot out the door, and she pressed close to Severus. She could barely see where she was going, and slipped as they stepped onto cobblestone. He transferred her grip to his far arm, and wrapped the other around her shoulders, guiding her through the streets with a familiarity and security she appreciated. She was reminded of many nights in London, huddled together under an umbrella as they wandered among Muggles. The memory of his arms around her on those evenings had sustained her through long months alone during her studies.

Hogsmeade was not actually that large a village, and Severus lived close to the pub. They were at his door soon enough, and then standing in the entry, snow-melt dripping from their cloaks. Luna fumbled the clasp at her neck, caught up watching Severus as he removed both cloak and outer robes. She had last seen him at Halloween, at a fund-raising dinner party in London. He cut a dashing figure in formal robes, but she vastly preferred him like this: casual jumper and trousers. She didn't think she had ever seen him without his buttoned black boots, but he left those on the rack by the door to dry and slipped into a pair of soft house shoes. She couldn't help it; she stared at his feet.

Her hood dripped onto her nose. Luna jumped at the sudden cold, and laughed at herself, knowing by the tiny smirk on his face that Severus was laughing, too. He stepped closer - it was not hard in the small space - and gently moved her hands aside. She tilted her chin up, keeping her scarred side out of the light, to give him better access as he unhooked the stubborn clasp and swung her cloak off her shoulders.

"Thank you," she whispered while his back was turned to hang it up. She unbuttoned her heavy winter robes as well, taking her cue from him, and they joined her cloak on a hook near the door. Her dress was a bit wrinkled after spending the night in a heap on Ginny's floor, but Luna was reluctant to call attention to it now by casting a freshening charm. It would have to do.

"Leave your boots," he said. "There are slippers there." He let his wand fall into his hand and gestured with it. A door opened in the wall, revealing a cupboard full of soft leather shoes and knitted slippers. Luna wound the laces of her boots around the green and gold painted leather and tucked the ends inside. They looked very small next to Severus's on the shoe rack, and she felt very short without their heels.

She selected a pair of slippers, knowing they must have been a gift since she could not imagine Severus purchasing something in that shade of magenta, and her fingers tingled as they encountered enchantments in the wool. She was not surprised, therefore, when the footwear sized itself to her feet the moment she put them on. "Quite a collection you have there," she teased, closing the door once more.

Severus shrugged, and with another twitch of his wand the cupboard door melted back into the wall. "Minerva maintains that I never know when I may have a horde of visitors. I am never sure whether she means that as a warning or a threat."

Luna laughed, and followed him through the second door into the cottage proper. Long ago when she and her friends had been children in experience as well as age, they had speculated about Professor Snape's home. They had likened it to a dragon's den, full of mystery and danger for anyone foolish or brave enough to enter. In all the years of learning to know him, of long dinner conversations, of evening walks through London, of falling and falling and never noticing until it was too late, Luna had never entered his home. Crossing his threshold filled her with a giddy sense of hope.

The parlor was a cozy room just off the entry, quickly warmed by the fire Severus set to roaring on the hearth. Bookshelves climbed all the way to the ceiling, and the drapes were a muted green and black tartan that was surely also Minerva's influence.

Severus walked through to the kitchen to set the kettle on for tea as Luna perused the titles on the nearest shelves. Some of them were familiar, but a few of the more recent works of fiction surprised her. She pulled down a copy of the latest entry in a popular mystery series and flipped it open.

She felt his presence in the room again after skimming the first few pages, and she looked up. He was watching her with quiet amusement. "I didn't know you read Lady Grimley," she said, closing the book and running her fingers over the title, _Lady Grimley and the Rainbow Cloak_ by Desdemona Lennox.

"I didn't," Severus replied with a tiny curve of his lips, not even enough to be a smile. "Pomona has long been a fan, however, and left me a copy of the first volume while I was ill two winters ago. They are quite... entertaining." He sounded like he begrudged the books for holding his interest.

Luna slid the book back into place. "My Mum used to read them to me at bedtime." As Severus's eyebrows approached his hairline, Luna laughed and quickly reassured him. "She did a lot of editing. I was quite shocked when I got my hands on them again at Hogwarts."

The Lady Grimley Mysteries were one of the most successful series in Wizarding Britain, partly for the plucky, unaging heiress heroine and partly for the amazingly varied and graphic descriptions of said heroine's love life. Every book saw her seduced or seducing two, oftentimes three, Wizards or Magical Beings in the course of her investigations into the crime du jour.

"Unexpurgated volumes of_ Lady Grimley and the Dark Prince_ and _Lady Grimley in the Haunted Wood_ were especially popular in the dormitories," Luna confessed, and felt herself blush when his expression revealed that he knew just what would have been purged from those particular volumes.

"Always so precocious, Ravenclaw," Severus murmured, then turned back to the kitchen at the call of the kettle.

Luna followed him through a short hall lined like the parlor in books. The kitchen was a bright and surprisingly large room free of bookshelves, with two windows, one over the sink and another above the table in a tiny breakfast nook. She wandered near the table, and realized that what she thought was a painting on the wall opposite the window was actually a wide rectangular mirror in an antique silver frame that reflected the riot of colorful flowers in the window box. When she stepped in front of it to admire the filigreed silver vines, she was distracted by her own reflection.

The cold had put a flush on her face, and darkened the already red lines on her cheek to an angry, bruised purple. They were wider than scars from a healed laceration, two or three millimeters in some places, and shiny like old burns. The red tint and the smooth surface were both indicative of the particular cocktail of poisons Rabastan had used on the blades. Luna bit her lip, and shook her head so that her hair fell forward to partially cover her cheek.

She was startled when a pale hand appeared in the mirror and tucked her hair back. "Don't," Severus said, his voice dark and low. "Don't hide, not here." The brush of Severus's fingers against the curve of her ear made her shiver. Those fingers left her ear to follow the line of her jaw, lingering over the scars.

Luna could not remember the last time anyone had touched them. Not even her Healers had to touch her directly anymore. Severus had certainly never touched her like this. She held her breath as he ran his fingertip delicately up the widest of the marks, a thick rope of purple at her jawline that narrowed halfway up her cheek and tapered off just below her left eye. With anyone else, she would have cringed away by now. When his fingers skimmed along her cheekbone to her temple she exhaled. It was not the cold that put the flush in her skin now.

He ran his fingers through her hair, gently moving the waist-long strands back so that she could not hide behind them at all. The wounds had not been so deep on her neck, so the scars there had healed in red lines like the marks of a quill. They widened again at her collarbone, hinting at the damage hidden beneath the fabric of her dress. She kept her focus very narrowly on his hand in the mirror, trying not to see the damaged flesh he seemed intent on revealing. Where had he learned to move with such economy and grace?

Luna looked up at him, and his expression puzzled her. There was an openness to his face she had not seen before, not even when he had laughed with her during their long London walks. His eyes were bright with emotion. She wished she knew what he was thinking.

"Severus?" she asked, then wished she hadn't and bit her lip again.

He pulled his hand away quite suddenly, and his expression went cold and neutral. "I - that was presumptuous of me. I apologize." Then he turned away, bracing his hands on the counter.

Luna had seen him do this before. His words were always of her strength and resiliency, his admiration for her work, a quiet humor at the touches of her childhood flights of fancy. He spoke to her as an equal, a woman, a witch of some skill. Yet he held himself so coldly far from her physically. He touched her seldom, and when he did it was with the most rigid decorum. She wondered now if she had dreamed every moment of warmth he had ever shown.

She had thought her scars did not matter to him. He had plenty enough of his own, after all. What to say to this infuriating apology? This man was one of the powerful wizards in Britain, an accomplished Occlumens, a subtle and gifted potions-maker. Was he truly so blind, or did he genuinely believe there was a line he could not cross here? Whatever lines there may have been Luna had erased for him months ago. Had she been wrong about everything after all?

Her skin, even the scar tissue that had no nerves to feel, burned with the knowledge of his touch. She could feel it in her hair, for Merlin's sake. Her hands curled into fists, and she shook her hair back over her face.

She watched him in silence, observing the lines of his back, the tension in his hands, the bowed head, the glimpse of pale skin at the nape of his neck where his dark hair parted over his shoulders. It was entirely possible that they could have stood like that for hours; it felt like hours.

"I don't accept," she said into that silence at last.

"I beg your pardon?" Severus asked, his shoulders tightening. He did not turn around.

"I don't accept your apology," Luna clarified. "And you're a bloody idiot for offering one in the first place."

"I have no right to take such. . . liberties, Miss Lovegood."

And back to her surname again! He made her want to throw things. "Do you need an engraved invitation?" she snarled, then turned on her heel. She walked very deliberately to the door, and paused at the threshold. "Or perhaps your first good look at the goods gave you second thoughts. Every other man I've cared about has recoiled, too, Severus."

She heard him call her name, then, but she hurried to the door, pulling her cloak from the hook without bothering with boots or robes. She cast a warming charm over her slippered feet and ran down the front steps into the streets.

The snow had stopped falling, but the day was still frigid and with each step Luna's feet sank into the drifts. She pulled the cloak tighter around her and hurried down the nearly empty road, turning the first available corner. It was not until she made her second corner that she realized her feet were carrying her in a particular direction.

She stopped in the middle of a familiar street, every breath clouding the air before her. She did not want to keep going. She could stop here, go back to the Three Broomsticks, take a room for the night and weep for the loss she felt. Or she could take a step forward, and another, and two more, and then she would be at the corner of the alley behind Greengrass Apothecary.

Luna did not remember making a decision, but quite suddenly she was there, standing on the pavement with one hand touching the brick of the Apothecary, looking down the narrow alley between the buildings.

She was lying on the cobblestones, whimpering, bleeding, dying. Luna could see it so clearly, as if she had stepped into a Pensieve. She bit her knuckle to stifle a scream as she walked halfway down the empty alley. It was not really happening. It was the past, a past she had left behind.

It had been the end of her life, her post-war life of ease and research aided by the friends who had remained close after school. It had been the end of everything she believed about herself, about the lines she would never cross, about the way she responded to fear.

Luna Lovegood had not been a killer until that evening behind the Apothecary.

It had been a beginning, too, for the Luna she had become. Perhaps it was like being able to see thestrals, but once she had taken a life the wrackspurts and nargles of the past did not require so much of her attention. Other creatures waited to be discovered, documented, and reported, and she had hurried to do so. Anywhere but here.

Luna stared down the alley at the ghost of herself, the young woman who had found the will to fight and to live. Where was that will to fight now?

She had been foolish to run away from Severus. Foolish and cowardly not to shake him until he told her what he was thinking. Not to wait him out until he spoke, wait for him to fill that silence with explanation. Not to just tell him, to hand him her heart to destroy if he must, but to know that he held it first, that he understood what the last few years had meant to her. Merlin, Merlin, she loved him, and she had run away.

The crunch of footsteps in the snow at the end of the alley made her turn, pulling her wand free.

"Severus," she breathed, not quite believing it.

He had not come out so ill-prepared for the weather; his boots and robes were neatly buttoned beneath his cloak. He would not have needed to hurry; the streets were empty enough in the cold that her tracks were easy to follow.

He did not stop walking when she turned on him, but came right up to her, and folded his cloak around her. His retirement from Hogwarts had not softened his powers of intimidation; his presence overpowered the ghosts of Luna's past and the shades vanished. But she did not lean on him. She stood very straight, her hands at her sides, wand still out, and looked up. He kept her loosely in the circle of his cloak, and stroked her hair back from her face as he had done in the house.

"Luna," he said, very quietly. He would not look her in the eyes, but stared at something beyond her shoulder as he drew in his breath.

Luna spoke before he could. "I love you," she whispered. Then she found her voice and repeated it at a normal volume. "I love you."

He closed his eyes against her words. When he opened them, he looked at her, really looked at her, and laid his hand gently against her scarred cheek. "You should not," he said.

She lifted her left hand to his wrist as she turned her face into his palm, and placed a gentle kiss to the line where his thumb met the Mount of Venus. His fingers curled but he did not withdraw. There was so much pain is his face, and she knew she was the cause of it. She took a half step away from him. "I'll go -"

"No," Severus said, the single syllable cutting like a knife.

Luna pressed her lips together, knowing that her grip on his wrist was too tight but unable to let go.

"No," Severus repeated, and this time he gentled his voice, pulling her closer against him. "Don't go. Just be still." The hand that cradled her cheek trembled. His other hand came up to frame her face. "Why, Luna?"

"Look," she invited, laying her mind open as she met his eyes.

"Don't -" he protested, but she let go of his wrist and reached up to curl her hand around the angle of his jaw, to thread her fingers through the long hair behind his ear.

"Look," she repeated, running her thumb along his cheekbone.

Falling into his eyes was like falling through a cave into the deep parts of the earth - and Luna had done her share of that. She wondered what it felt like for him to fall into hers; her eyes were nothing like the dark earth, or even the deep sea, but some thin and flimsy fog over the marshes, colorless and transparent. She did not imagine that her secrets were very difficult to plumb.

When she had trained in Legilimency and Occlumency in Russia, there had been no warmth or connection. Now she felt both, and knew that part of it was her willingness to let him in, but part of it was also his skill.

Here was the morning when Severus woke in the Hogwarts Infirmary after the final battle six years ago, when Luna and Susan Bones had been taking their turn watching over the wounded. Here was Luna, holding his hand as he struggled to orient himself after so much blood loss and an intoxicating blend of healing potions. Here was the promise he had made: to call her Luna when she was a grown woman, not a student.

With a feeling like sinking underwater, that memory fell into another, this one two years later when the rogue Death Eaters put Hogsmeade through six days of terror, and the fifth day was when Rabastan attacked Luna. She knew, now, that Rabastan had probably not known who she was, or that she even recognized him. Back then, it had all seemed so targeted. She fainted before she was found, but to her surprise the scene played on. Severus's memories, now, and Luna had not even known that he was there. He watched, with the others, as the Aurors retrieved the bodies, and she realized that he recognized her, even mangled and covered in blood.

He thought she was dead.

Luna had not had a connection quite like this before; the communication suddenly cut two ways, as if she were living in the reflection in a mirror. She knew, with absolute certainty, that Severus had believed, just for that moment, that she was dead. Harry and Ron arrived, as they tended to do despite orders to the contrary whenever Death Eater activity spiked. Ron held Luna's hand as the mediwizard announced that she was alive, and arranged a portkey to St. Mungo's. She had never known that.

The memory blurred and was carried away on the tide of a new scene, Luna first approaching Severus in London. After living in Germany for seven weeks, she was still not used to the looks of surprised horror or disgust on the faces of those who saw her, but she had not yet started recklessly spending her energy on glamours. She had wanted only to thank him, and said so: "Let me thank you, sir - I know how much you did for me in hospital."

And he had looked down at her, and his expression relaxed from its usual harsh lines, and he had agreed. Tea, and stories from her apprenticeship, would be thanks enough. Had that been when it started?

Luna did not think so. She moved the current of memory forward, to one particular day, not so different from their other meetings. They ate good food, and conversed on many topics. The range of conversation had surprised him, Luna could tell. There were few things they could not discuss, and even when potions came up Luna held her own.

She had told some innocuous story of her students working an archaeological dig, and Severus had looked across the table at her with a face full of mirth. And he had laughed, a full-throated guffaw leaning back in his cafe chair, all the walls and masks fallen before that unrestrained joy. Luna fancied she could see the actual moment when her affection for him had become passion.

Then the current shifted without her intervention, and she saw them once more sitting in a cafe, this one near the river, and they were quiet together, but comfortably so. She realized after a moment that this was the first time in years that she had dropped her glamour for their meetings, and Severus had felt deep emotion at the trust he saw in the gesture. Luna had not remembered any great revelation; one day she wore the glamours, and the next time they met she felt they were a pointless vanity. Warm amusement flooded her awareness as she thought those things, and she was reminded that this was a sharing of minds.

The scene shifted again, and she was looking at herself in the mirror in Severus's kitchen, and he saw her hide behind her hair. She felt the anger in him at that gesture, at the idea that it was necessary, and she felt also the shame. He should not have brought her home, he should not have agreed to dinner all those years ago. Now he had lost all sense and would ruin her with his regard, as he had ruined all other beautiful things he had loved.

This was more than Luna could comfortably process. Emotions and images piled on too fast, a blur of dark hair around a narrow face, a quiet voice singing a lullaby, bright green eyes full of wonder then vacant in death, cruel laughter, a sense of flying, a crippling pain radiating from her neck, snow-white deer running through the trees. None of it had any meaning she could fathom outside of the overwhelming despair, and every blink of her eyes brought another incoherent mesh of senses. "Stop," she said, although at first she could not tell if it was her spirit-self speaking or her physical self. "Stop, Severus. Let me out." That was her physical self.

She inhaled and on her next exhale the bridge connecting her mind to Severus's vanished.

She leaned back, and found in his face the same shock that weakened her knees.

He must not have been too steady himself, for instead of walking them back, he pulled her just far enough out of the alley to clear the building wards and Side-Along Apparated her to his back gate. She said nothing as he led her back inside and tucked her into the corner of the chaise with a blanket and a cup of tea.

When he moved to stand, Luna lifted her face from the steam and said only, "Stay."

Severus met her eyes, his expression guarded, then sat again at the foot of the chaise. If she moved her feet just a little she could touch him, but she held herself very still until the calming tea began its work.

After a moment, she set the empty teacup and saucer on the side table and folded her hands on her knees. She watched him, read the tension and sorrow in his body, and thought to herself that she could not possibly be fully recovered from her many traumas if this man was the answer to all her heart's desires. It was, in fact, such a ridiculous idea, such a wildly unpredictable and completely doomed direction that she found herself smiling.

They were completely unsuited seen from the outside, their only common threads love for exotic research and for ethnic foods. Was that so much to build a life on? At least they would never go hungry. Now she giggled, covering her mouth with her hands, and he turned incredulous eyes on her. She leaned forward until her head rested against his arm, and she laughed. She laughed so hard she cried, and then she cried until she laughed again, and by then Severus had gathered her in his arms like a wild creature he was not certain how to hold. She did not mind, because as she quieted, leaning on him, he kept hold of her.

Now that she had broken through his final physical boundary, she felt no reluctance to touch him. She traced his face with her fingers as if she were blind, running them over the thin brows and deep-set eyes, the sharp cheekbones and thin lips, the distinctive hook of his nose. She was not certain how long it would be allowed, so she took as much as she could, and twisted in his arms so that she could rest her face in the curve of his neck.

Here, as nowhere else in the world, she felt safe and content. She let her roaming hand settle quietly against his chest and sighed, wishing she could put this feeling in a bottle to take out and enjoy when she was lonely, once this interlude ended and Severus regained his senses.

"Luna." In his whisper she heard the beginning of the end.

Luna took a strengthening breath and lifted her head.

Severus bent his, and in the split second between resignation and realization Luna gasped, "Oh!" Then he kissed her.

It was not, as kisses went, the best on record. They bumped noses at first, moving at cross-purposes. Severus was clumsy with his teeth, and Luna could barely breathe after her crying jag, but after the first awkward seconds all of that ceased to matter. Their second kiss was gentler, tender, with none of the urgency Luna had come to associate with first times.

"Beautiful Luna," Severus murmured as they parted, and Luna laughed, because now of all times she could not possibly be beautiful - scarred, flushed and red from crying, her face a mess of tears and snot and saliva. He offered her his handkerchief, and she blew her nose.

Although his face was still sober, his eyes were smiling again. Perhaps Luna would make it the work of her life to create reasons for Severus to smile. His laughter would be a prize for which she could strive continually.

He brushed loose curls away from her face and ran the backs of his fingers along her scarred cheek. "Mad, beautiful Luna."

She sniffled into his hanky again, turning her face away into the back of the chaise. That left her scars exposed, and he kept touching them, a delicate brush of skin that tickled the edges where she still had sensation. She shivered as he ran two fingers over the curve of her collarbone, just where one of the blades had caught and skidded along the bone. It was the deepest cut, and the one the Healers had worried over the most, for fear that she would not regain full mobility in her arm and neck.

"How can you bear to . . ." Luna began, flinching involuntarily away from his hand as he touched the worst of the visible scarring. His hand moved from her collarbone to her shoulder, away from the scars, and she sighed.

"Bear to touch you?" Severus finished for her, leaning close so that his breath warmed her ear. "Caress you?" He drew her close as he reclined into the pillows at the end of the chaise. "Kiss you? All of you is beautiful to me."

The first time he kissed one of her scars, just at the base of her jaw near her ear, she shuddered violently in his arms, clutching his shirt in her fists. She bit her lip and pressed her face into his neck as he stroked her hair. He kissed along the scar from jaw to cheek, where he must have tasted the tears on her skin.

Only then did he ease away, just far enough to see her, and she forced her hands to relax enough that she could cradle his face in them, though they trembled. "Severus," she said. She met his eyes and saw there a caution and a unease that matched her own. It had been so long. "No one -" she gulped back a sob, refusing to allow herself to break down again. There was no need for it with Severus. She began again. "No one has ever - not since -" Since her injury there had been so few willing to touch her at all, let alone seek intimacy.

He laid his fingers gently over her lips to stop her confession. "Hush. It doesn't matter."

"But I don't know how to -" she started, and he cut her off with a kiss. When they parted, he let his head fall slowly to the pillow beside hers. Tentatively, she ran her fingers over his lips.

"We can learn together," he said, kissing her fingertips as he ran his hand along her arm. For long moments, she lost herself in the worship of his hands and lips. She had never before felt so wanted.

When they paused for breath, she realized that she had found all that she sought in Hogsmeade in this one day. "All that panic for nothing," she whispered.

"Hm?" Severus looked inquisitive.

Luna leaned her head on the pillow so that her forehead touched his, and explained, "I don't know what frightened me more - returning to the site of the attack, or seeking you out only to be rejected. It took me three tries just to step into the Floo."

He grimaced at that, and his hand gentled its caresses. "I am sorry for letting you think, even for a moment, that I could reject you."

"That apology I will accept," she whispered.

Luna closed her eyes, but her fingers were still resting along his cheek, so even though she could not see his face she recognized his expression from the shape of his mouth against her skin.

Severus smiled.


End file.
